Strategy University Vol. 3: Positional Pawn Sacrifice

In chess we have certain aims - coordination and the activation of one’s own pieces. Sometimes we need a special little something to speed up one of these processes - a small material sacrifice, mainly a pawn or pawns. A dynamic pawn sacrifice is easy to see, as the idea is to get clear gains for the pawn.

Positional pawn sacrifices are much more difficult, as their real purpose does not become clear immediately, but only during the development of the plan. There were famous masters of positional pawn sacrifices - Bronstein, Kasparov and Romanishin.

Adrian Mikhalchishin, a Grandmaster since 1978, is currently among the top 5 world trainers and the Chairman of the FIDE Trainers’ Commission.

He trained the team of USSR in 1980’s, national teams of Slovenia, Poland and the Netherlands, and was the trainer of Anatoly Karpov (1980-1986), trained Zsuzsa Polgar, Alexander Beliavsky, Maja Chiburdanidze, Arkadij Naiditsch and Vassily Ivanchuk.